Sunday, August 06, 2006

To be or not to be

The following exchange between the BBC’s John Humphrys and Chief of Defence Staff Jock Stirrup has been bugging me since I heard it on Wednesday's Today (9 mins in):

Stirrup: What is important to realise is that we are there on the side of the Afghans.

Humphrys: But we’re killing them!

Stirrup: We’re killing some people. People talk about confusion in this mission. This mission can be stated very, very simply: it’s about governance. It’s about helping the leaders of Afghanistan extend governance to a part of their country that hasn’t had it for a long time.

Humphrys: But we’re dropping bombs on villages - a report this morning - “18 Taliban militants and 1 policeman killed in clashes in southern Afghanistan” - this in the last hour.

We've killed 18 Taliban “militants”, monsters who chop the heads off teachers, and yet Humphrys sees this as a bad thing. Could there be a clearer example of the 1930s pacifist mindset which dominates the BBC? And I mean pacifism in the sense that Orwell identified:

Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries.

vowing that the programme would continue to have “independent-minded presenters”, and backed John Humphrys’s robust interviewing. Today would also make more use of senior BBC journalists such as Jeremy Bowen.

That's Jeremy “Israeli War Crimes” Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor who counts frothing anti-American leftie John Pilger as one of his biggest fans. Pilger likens him to Robert Fisk. So do I.

And when Thomas talks of senior journalists he no doubt includes the BBC’s “McGonagall of grief” Fergal Keane (or Oh No, Not Fergal Fucking Keane as he’s known in my household), whose reports are so sickly thick with sentiment he could make a Care Bear throw up.

With such people interpreting events on behalf of the British public it’s hardly surprising that an appeasement mentality seems to be on the rise again in the UK.

It is now a cliché to rant about the spread of postmodernism, cultural relativism, utopian pacifism, and moral equivalence among the affluent and leisured societies of the West. But we are seeing the insidious wages of such pernicious theories as they filter down from our media, universities, and government — and never more so than in the general public’s nonchalance since Hezbollah attacked Israel.

These past few days the inability of millions of Westerners, both here and in Europe, to condemn fascist terrorists who start wars, spread racial hatred, and despise Western democracies is the real story, not the “quarter-ton” Israeli bombs that inadvertently hit civilians in Lebanon who live among rocket launchers that send missiles into Israeli cities and suburbs.

In Britain the dissemination of these "pernicious theories" is funded by a compulsory tax; through the licence fee we are forced to pay for the very propaganda which gives succour to the enemies of our way of life. This is an absurd state of affairs.John Podhoretz recently asked:

WHAT if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?...

Can any war be won when this is the nature of the discussion in the countries fighting the war? Can any war be won when one of the combatants voluntarily limits itself in this manner?

Unless the influence of appeasers such as those at the BBC is checked, then supremacist Islam will indeed be victorious.